Colony: distributed organizations that actually work – with Aron Fischer and Jack du Rose

Podcast Notes

In this first episode of Season 3, we talk to Jack du Rose and Aron Fischer from Colony.io — an infrastructure for internet native companies and a key player in the evolution of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs).

Jack du Rose is a former jeweller, current blockchain nerd, and founder of Colony. He is excited by the power shift our decentralized future brings. When not making $100m diamond skulls, or paradigm shifting social platforms, Jack enjoys sesquipedalianism, bathos, and a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

Aron Fischer graduated with a PhD in Mathematics in 2015. Since then he has been researching the computer science aspects of programming in a blockchain environment. He is fascinated by the interplay of mathematics, economics, technology, and human nature that is inherent in systems. He has worked for the Ethereum Foundation and the Swarm team, and is a co-author of the Colony whitepaper. He continues to be involved with DAOs in general and the Colony project in particular.

Key highlights of the conversation:

We discussed:

• How, according to Colony, a lot of the question of autonomous organizing is about distributing budgets through reputation.
• How time-based mechanisms that ensure self-executing of rules make organizations have more bias towards action.
• How the possibility to create project-based currencies to help projects use “reputation” as an early currency when the financial model is still to be discovered.
• The importance of DAO “modularity”: decision making, consensus, and execution (where Colony can be an “execution” module).
• How the new priorities of organizing ask for building massive new capabilities and how these new technologies can create new affordances to make this possible.

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 14 October 2021.

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.